Related papers: SGB: Stochastic Gradient Bound Method for Optimizi…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) still is the workhorse for many practical problems. However, it converges slow, and can be difficult to tune. It is possible to precondition SGD to accelerate its convergence remarkably. But many attempts…
Stochastic variational inference (SVI) plays a key role in Bayesian deep learning. Recently various divergences have been proposed to design the surrogate loss for variational inference. We present a simple upper bound of the evidence as…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is perhaps the most prevalent optimization method in modern machine learning. Contrary to the empirical practice of sampling from the datasets without replacement and with (possible) reshuffling at each…
Motivated by applications arising from large scale optimization and machine learning, we consider stochastic quasi-Newton (SQN) methods for solving unconstrained convex optimization problems. The convergence analysis of the SQN methods,…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the optimization algorithm of choice in many machine learning applications such as regularized empirical risk minimization and training deep neural networks. The classical convergence analysis of SGD is…
Stochastic Gradient Descent with a constant learning rate (constant SGD) simulates a Markov chain with a stationary distribution. With this perspective, we derive several new results. (1) We show that constant SGD can be used as an…
Majorization-minimization algorithms consist of iteratively minimizing a majorizing surrogate of an objective function. Because of its simplicity and its wide applicability, this principle has been very popular in statistics and in signal…
Optimization algorithms are pivotal in advancing various scientific and industrial fields but often encounter obstacles such as trapping in local minima, saddle points, and plateaus (flat regions), which makes the convergence to reasonable…
In this work, we propose a novel adaptive stochastic gradient-free (ASGF) approach for solving high-dimensional nonconvex optimization problems based on function evaluations. We employ a directional Gaussian smoothing of the target function…
Non-convex optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning, especially in Deep Learning. While such complex problems can often be successfully optimized in practice by using stochastic gradient descent (SGD), theoretical analysis…
We propose a new stochastic gradient method for optimizing the sum of a finite set of smooth functions, where the sum is strongly convex. While standard stochastic gradient methods converge at sublinear rates for this problem, the proposed…
The question of how to incorporate curvature information in stochastic approximation methods is challenging. The direct application of classical quasi- Newton updating techniques for deterministic optimization leads to noisy curvature…
In this paper, we propose a distributed stochastic second-order proximal method that enables agents in a network to cooperatively minimize the sum of their local loss functions without any centralized coordination. The proposed algorithm,…
In this work we investigate the practicality of stochastic gradient descent and recently introduced variants with variance-reduction techniques in imaging inverse problems. Such algorithms have been shown in the machine learning literature…
We study the foundations of variational inference, which frames posterior inference as an optimisation problem, for probabilistic programming. The dominant approach for optimisation in practice is stochastic gradient descent. In particular,…
When using stochastic gradient descent to solve large-scale machine learning problems, a common practice of data processing is to shuffle the training data, partition the data across multiple machines if needed, and then perform several…
In this paper, we introduce an unbiased gradient simulation algorithms for solving convex optimization problem with stochastic function compositions. We show that the unbiased gradient generated from the algorithm has finite variance and…
Deep learning algorithms often require solving a highly non-linear and nonconvex unconstrained optimization problem. Methods for solving optimization problems in large-scale machine learning, such as deep learning and deep reinforcement…
This paper proposes a new framework to compute finite-horizon safety guarantees for discrete-time piece-wise affine systems with stochastic noise of unknown distributions. The approach is based on a novel approach to synthesise a stochastic…
This paper focuses on the distributed optimization of stochastic saddle point problems. The first part of the paper is devoted to lower bounds for the centralized and decentralized distributed methods for smooth (strongly) convex-(strongly)…